A New Direction For My Blog

Blogging and working full-time is a difficult task. Over the past few years I have written a lot of content that has never made its way to my blog. I simply haven’t had the time to do the fact checking and analysis necessary to produce compelling content. I have ended up writing a lot of short posts when I’d rather be writing more detailed responses to things I’ve read that include more footnotes and awesome charts.

I don’t want to let working full-time turn into an excuse for not writing or writing throwaway blog posts that don’t add any value. We should write and we should publish what we write because without writing down our thoughts we can’t be too sure of what we’re really thinking on any issue. There is a difference between a sound bite and a paragraph, and that difference includes a more accessible way of tracking the changes in your thinking over longer periods of time.

When I think about how the way we consume content has changed over the past decade with blogs, social media, smartphones and less face to face communication, I wonder what we’re losing by not encouraging people to move beyond 140 characters. The problem with Twitter is that, just like all communication that doesn’t take place face to face, context and body language cues aren’t present.

The risk in this situation is that writing a throwaway comment that is misinterpreted by the hive mind and the wider context of what led to such a throwaway comment being made is lost. There are no second chances if a stray tweet is retweeted and misinterpreted by thousands of people. #SocialMediaFail is an ever present phenomenon in 2014 across all types of users let alone some of the political and economic actors who seem to clog up my own Twitter feed 🙂

Because it is easier to shut out voices we disagree with, I think we need to make a conscious effort to read the writers who outrage us or read the writers who challenge our deeply held beliefs. Skeptical enquiry has a lot of benefits, and I think that in “forcing” myself to read different viewpoints my own views of the world have softened somewhat over the past few years.

I was reading an article recently that explained how people who read fictional novels on a regular basis were more understanding of the perspective of people other than themselves. It might be bunkum – but I’m certainly aware of the bubble I live in. In fact, I’d say that a lot of things I read on Twitter and other websites make me a sad panda because so many people are unaware of the bubble they inhabit and how it can lead to saying really out of touch things.

I’d like to think observing all of this has lead to a greater awareness that there really are different perspectives out there and filtering them all out because we want to construct a bubble where no one ever challenges the way we see the world is a slippery slope towards sounding like an automaton.

The new direction I intend to take with this blog is a more regular writing schedule with a lot more content that is less related to the news cycle or what I’m reading and more linked to a broader story I’m interested in. That story is how my generation will fare in the new normal when the political process is broken.